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Monday, September 28, 2015

Navy Officer Trageted After Exposing Alleged Fraud

Disgraced Navy officer says her career was ruined after red-flagging alleged fraud

Colleagues warned Sy'needa Penland not to take the job in 2006 that ended up costing her career.
The
recently formed Navy Expeditionary Combat Command had a reputation
among supply officers for playing fast and loose in the rush of wartime
dollars, Penland said, adding that she saw the Naval Coastal Warfare
Group 1 comptroller job as a challenge she was ready for.
Within
months she was public enemy No. 1 at the command, she recalled. When the
dust settled on her career three years later, Lt. Cmdr. Penland was
drummed out of the Navy months shy of her 20-year retirement mark after
spending two months in jail in a case that garnered national attention.
Penland says she was retaliated against for confronting her bosses about
what she felt was wasteful spending and is fighting back: she
self-published a tell-all memoir and filed a lawsuit in federal court
seeking the Navy to overturn her board of inquiry and Board
for Correction of Naval Records appeal decision and allow her to qualify
for a military pension.
"A Navy officer that was single — that was the catch there — how did I end up in the brig?" Penland, 44, told Navy Times.
In
2008, Penland was court-martialed on allegations of alleged adultery,
making false official statements and conduct unbecoming an officer.
Penland was accused of carrying on an affair with Lt. j.g. Mark Wiggan, a
former colleague aboard the destroyer Stout in Norfolk. Both officers
denied carrying on the affair, but prosecutors built their case around
testimony from Wiggan's estranged wife and photos found on Wiggan's
computer.
Wiggan's chain of command chose not to prosecute him for
reasons that are unclear, but the trial was another blow in Penland's
struggle with her leadership.
"The command, they kept spearheading
this, and I never did quite understand why," she said. Penland alleges
her court-martial and subsequent discharge stemmed from her fight to
expose contracting fraud.
The Navy argues that she was
administratively separated for misconduct and poor performance. A
spokesman for the Navy secretary referred questions about the handling
of Penland's case to the Justice Department, which declined to comment..
"Because
the lawsuit remains pending, we have no comment beyond our public
filings," spokesman Bill Miller told Navy Times on Sept. 24.
Legals
experts said the case was atypical for two reasons: only one officer
was disciplined even though both were implicated, and that the convicted
officer was forced out for adultery.
"Show me how this impacted
good order and discipline," said defense attorney Larry D. Youngner. "It
strikes me as a very interesting pursuit of an officer, in light of the
whistleblower complaint, in light of the shared
responsibility — assuming for argument’s sake that they were both
culpable."
In her self-published memoir, "Broken Silence: A
Military Whistleblower's Fight for Justice," Penland details her career
and crusade to expose alleged fraud at NECC, what she calls false
adultery charges and her ongoing effort to restore her service record.'Broken Silence'
The
trouble started in early 2006, when she checked in at NCWG-1 as their
budget comptroller, took on the duties of government credit card program
coordinator and contracting officer.
Within weeks of starting,
she wrote, she received a frantic call from someone who claimed to work
with the defense contracting company Science Applications International
Corp., asking if he could send over an invoice billing her command for
unauthorized services.

"He
said his company needed to pay their utility bill and the salaries of a
few employees, but he would annotate the invoice to reference 'training
services,' " she wrote. "He kept evading my question, and went on to
explain that it was common practice between him, my predecessor and my
supervisor ... to bill the command for unperformed services and charge
it to a preexisting procurement contract."
A public relations representative for SAIC did not respond to phone messages by press time .
She
also had thought it odd that NCWG-1's small facility at Naval Outlying
Landing Field Imperial Beach, south of San Diego, had such nicely
appointed offices, with flat screen computers and laptops for all, in
addition to a newly renovated gym.
She later discovered that the
commercial-grade gym equipment had been bought with "cost of war" funds,
which are specifically approved by Congress to support units deployed
overseas. When she was copied on an email between the command senior
supply officer and the commodore, now-retired Capt. John Sturges,
discussing buying another commercial-grade elliptical machine, she said
she tried to warn the commodore that the expense wasn't authorized.
“I
came to realize that the ballooning of the Coastal Warfare budget and
the illegal allocation of funds fit neatly into the larger picture of
fraud and entitlement in the post 9/11 U.S. military," Penland
wrote. "As the new Anti-Terrorism Force Protection strategies were
instituted, no cost was spared, and the free flow of funding left plenty
of room for greedy and unscrupulous behavior.”
Reached via LinkedIn message, Sturges declined to comment for this article.
One
particular contract, with Logistics Support, Inc., caught her eye. She
asked to perform an informal review and audit of the command's budget
programs, she said, but her leadership thought she was demanding to have
them formally investigated. She held off, but continued to gather
evidence and question the command's contracting practices.
A public relations representative for LS, Inc. did not respond to phone messages by press time .
“She
made it hard for us, but it was never personal," retired Lt. Cmdr.
Steve Harper, who worked with Penland when he was a supply officer at
Maritime Security Unit Squadron 5, told Navy Times in a Sept. 22 phone
interview.
“She was a hard nose at times," he said of working with her. "She was stubborn, as every good supply officer should be.”
Penland
said she took pride in her work ethic, but for the first time, she
found herself at a command that didn't appreciate her attention to
detail.Criminal allegations
Before she
left Norfolk for San Diego, Penland had been a supply officer aboard the
destroyer Stout, where she had mentored another prior-enlisted officer
named Lt. j.g. Mark Wiggan.
He had confided in her that his
marriage to his wife Kim, a chief assigned to the cruiser Mobile Bay,
was unraveling and he had become the victim of her physical abuse.
Penland loaned him her digital camera to document the abuse; she says
she didn't erase the memory card beforehand.
When Mark backed up
the photos onto his computer, it backed up the camera's entire memory.
That included sexually explicit images of Penland with a man. Kim
discovered these in late 2006. Prosecutors alleged they showed Mark and
Penland in sexual acts; Penland says they show an ex-boyfriend.
"He
said he’d accidentally erased the disc before returning my camera, but
it seems he’d kept copies of my nude photographs, which played right
into Kim’s alimony plans," Penland wrote.
Months later, Penland
said, Kim went to her command with allegations of adultery after Mark's
command decided not to pursue charges, she said.
NCWG-1 launched
an investigation into the adultery claims in early 2007. She rejected
their offer of a captain's mast, heading to an Article 32 hearing in
August, where the investigating officer ruled that she should go to
captain's mast and face a BOI if found guilty of the allegations.
Her command instead pressed ahead with a court-martial, which began the following year on May 21, 2008.
"Not
only was the married husband in this case never charged or prosecuted,
but also senior government officials offered him immunity, as long as he
agreed to testify against me," she wrote. "Even so, Mark declined the
government’s immunity offer and later testified at my trial, denying
that he ever had sexual intercourse with me."
On the strength of
the prosecution's case, Penland was convicted of the charges and
sentenced to 60 days in the brig, a $9,000 fine and a punitive letter of
reprimand.
Penland said she was shocked by her sentence at the
time, and shocked years later as multiple high-level military officials
have been allowed to retire in grade without formal charges following
affairs.
Her case also baffled the legal community, said Youngner,
the defense attorney and retired colonel who'd been a practicing Air
Force judge advocate when Penland was sentenced.
"There’s a lot of
reasons in this particular case that make you pause and go, 'Wow, why
did they really pursue this?' " Youngner, now a managing partner at the
Tully Rinckey law firm in Washington, D.C., said in an interview.
In
his experience, he said, it's common for the more senior officer in an
inappropriate relationship to get a harsher punishment, which could
explain Penland's sentence, but not why Wiggan wasn't charged at all.
On the other hand, it's up to commanders to maintain their own standards, Youngner said, even if Penland's case was harsh.
"It
seems to naturally suggest there must have been something else," he
said. "What could it be? Could it be that this person has raised
concerns, that then-Lt. Cmdr. Penland noted discrepancies? Well, what a
great way to get rid of someone."Fighting back
Once
she was under investigation, Penland decided it was time to officially
blow the whistle. In April 2007 she filed an inspector general complaint
against her command, citing multiple instances of procurement and
contracting fraud, as well as budget mismanagement.
In June she
filed an equal-opportunity complaint, after hearing from a civilian in
the command that her CO and staff attorney told her colleagues about the
sexually explicit photos that lead to her charges, and that they had
been shown to numerous unauthorized people.
She also alleged that her CO had counseled her for poor performance as retaliation for her IG filing.

In a new memoir, Sy'needa Penland argues it was unfair that she was jailed for adultery, while the male officer was never tried. (Photo: Courtesy photo)

The
Navy never substantiated the EO complaint, but over a year later, while
she was in the brig, NECC's inspector general released a July 18, 2008
report detailing three substantiated allegations out of 14 originally
submitted.
The IG found that civilians at NCWG-1 — renamed
Maritime Expeditionary Security Group 1 at the time of the report — had
against policy performed inherently governmental functions at the
command, that contractors had performed personal services for members of
the command and that the command had procured office trailers without
proper permission.
Penland was then served paperwork starting her
BOI while in the brig. She filed for clemency with the BCNR to have her
conviction taken out of BOI consideration, but to no avail.
She
was given a general discharge under honorable conditions, citing
unacceptable conduct for the adultery conviction and poor performance,
on July 31, 2009; a general discharge is an administrative measure that
is one notch below an honorable discharge. In late December, Penland
would have reached her 20th year of service. She first joined as a
crypotologic technician and earned her commission from Officer
Candidate School in 1997.
Penland has filed several times in the
past six years to have her BOI results disregarded through Navy
channels, asking to be allowed to retire as an O-4 and receive her
pension.
Today, she lives off of Veterans Administration
disability benefits, as a blood cancer diagnosis during her last months
in the Navy resulted in a 100 percent rating, she said.
She filed a
last-ditch effort earlier this year in Washington, D.C. federal court,
suing Navy Secretary Ray Mabus to have her BOI disregarded and her full
retirement benefits restored.
Youngner, who is not representing
Penland, said she could make a solid case if she can prove that her
court-martial was unjust, as it was the basis for the board of inquiry's
decision to separate her.
He suggested she obtain sworn
statements from both her ex-boyfriend affirming it was him in the photos
and from Wiggan, affirming that he never had a relationship with
Penland. She could then ask to be reinstated to active-duty to face a
grade determination board and retire as a lieutenant commander, he said.
"Is
it fair to throw her out for a private, consensual activity after
filing a whistleblower complaint, after serving her country honorably
for over 19 years?" he said. "I say no, that’s not fair. That’s my
closing argument."
As of late August, the Navy had acknowledged
Penland's complaint and asked for a summary judgment in lieu of a trial,
giving Penland 75 days to respond.
At this point, she said, the
lawsuit is less about receiving benefits and more about raising
awareness about the injustice she went through.
"It’s keeping the
issue alive. It’s a 50/50. It’s a gamble," she said. "I don’t want the
judge to think that I’m trying to make this a media story, but it needs
to be."
She had been writing her story on and off since her
discharge, she said, but decided to self-publish it on Amazon.com this
year. She's met many other veterans through blogging and social media,
she said, and would like to spend her next chapter advocating for them.
"But I had to tell my story first, before I could move on and help others," she said.

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